Seascape: Needle's Eye

by George Oppen

1972 SUMAC PRESS SOFTCOVER

Genres: Poetry

37 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 1972

About the author

George Oppen (April 24, 1908 – July 7, 1984) was an American poet, best known as one of the members of the Objectivist group of poets. He abandoned poetry in the 1930s for political activism, and later moved to Mexico to avoid the attentions of the House Un-American Activities Committee. He returned to poetry—and to the United States—in 1958, and received the Pulitzer Prize in 1969.

Reviews

[Louis Cabri]

The capital first letter of each line bears a crucial syntactic function, not only signals a literary convention.

I read Oppen no faster than slowest possible.

The convention of the capital first letter wears off, disclosing underneath the richness of its syntax.

+

Even "Anniversary Poem" has the plural first person pronoun used in an all-inclusive way.

+

"The Translucent Mechanics" read / taught alongside "The Idea of Order at Key West"

"what then"

+

Just noticed that I have Denise Levertov's copy. "Near fine with light bumping to head of spine and a touch of edgewear."

[Mat · Rating 4 out of 5]

Seascape: Needle's Eye is one of the later books of poetry by the Modernist / Objectivist poet George Oppen. My favourite book by him is Primitive, his final work, but this is worth reading too.

These poems are very musical and rhythmical - I recommend reading them out loud to fully appreciate how musical they are.

As for meaning ..... this is harder to grasp. These poems feel like meaning is always just out of reach. You can read and re-read the poems which lend themselves to various interpretations and readings and some of the imagery in this book is startling. Here is a small sample: "Strong as a tug's wake shorelights' / Fractured dances across rough water a music / Who would believe it / Not quite one's own." Oppen's poetry flickers with beautiful imagistic fragments that that you catch glimpses of .... they then melt away and slowly move towards another striking image.

To me, I still find him obscure but the poetry is musically and visually (in your head) a joy to read.
Definitely worth a read, and even though it's only 37 pages long, you could spend all day re-reading and re-interpreting some of these poems. In short, thought-provoking content, just this side of being too cerebral, and extremely musical and rhythmical.

[Sam · Rating 5 out of 5]

“In back deep the jewel
The treasure
No Liquid
Pride of the living life’s liquid
Pride in the sandspit wind this ether this other this element all
It is I or I believe
We are the beaks of the ragged birds
Tune of the ragged bird’s beaks
In the tune of the winds
Ob via the obvious
Like a fire of straws
Aflame in the world or else poor people hide
Yourselves together Place
Place where desire
Lust of the eyes the pride of life and foremost of the storm’s
Multitude moves the wave belly-lovely
Glass of the glass sea shadow of water
On the open water no other way
To come here the outer
Limit of the ego”
—
“Limited air drafts
In the treasure house moving and the movements of the living
Things fall something balanced Move
With all one’s force
Into the commonplace that pierces or erodes

The mind’s structure but nothing
Incredible happens
It will have happened to that other
The survivor The survivor
To him it happened

Rooted in basalt
Night hums like the telephone dial tone blue gauze
Of the forge flames the pulse
Of infant
Sorrows at the crux

Of the timbers
When the middle Kingdom
Warred with beasts Middle Things the elves the

Magic People in the world
Among the plant roots hopes
Which are the hopes
Of small self interest called

Superstition chitinous
Toys of the children wings
Of the wasp”
—
“Chance and chance and thereby starlit
All that was to be thought
Yes
Comes down the road Air of the waterfronts black air

Over the iron bollard the doors cracked

In the starlight things the things continue
Narrative their long instruction and the tide running
Strong as a tug’s wake shorelights’

Fractured dances across rough water a music
Who would believe it
Not quite one’s own
With one always the black verse the turn and the turn

At the lens’ focus the crystal pool innavigable

Torrent torment Eden’s
Flooded valley dramas

Of dredged water
A wind blowing out

And out to sea the late the salt times cling

In panicked

Spirals at the hull’s side sea’s streaks floating
Curved on the sea little pleasant soul wandering

Frightened
The small mid-ocean
Moon lights the winches”
—
“Unsure of the times
Unsure I can answer

To myself We have been ignited
Blazing
In wrath we await

The rare poetic
Of veracity that huge art whose geometric
Light seems not its own in that most dense world West and East
Have denied have hated have wandered in precariousness

Like a new fire

Will burn out the roots”
—
“Also is this lonely theme Earth
My sister

Lonely sister my sister but why did I weep
Meeting that poet again what was that rage

Before Leger’s art poster
In war time Paris perhaps art

IS one’s mother and father O rage
Of the exile Fought ice

Fought shifting stones
Beyond the battlement

Crevasse Fought

No man
But the fragments of metal
Tho there were men there were men Fought
No man but the fragments of metal”
—
“It is impossible the world should be either good or bad
If its colors are beautiful or if they are not beautiful
If parts of it taste good or if no parts of it taste good
It is as remarkable in one case as the other
As against this

We have suffered fear, we know something of fear
And of humiliation mounting to horror

The world above the edge of the foxhole belongs to the
flying bullets, leaden superbeings

For the men grovelling in the foxhole danger, danger in
being drawn to them

These little dumps
the poem is about them

Our hearts are twisted
In dead men’s pride

Dead men crowd us
Lean over us

In the emplacements

The skull spins
Empty of subject

The hollow ego

Flinching from the war’s huge air

Tho we are delivery boys and bartenders

We will choke on each other

Minds may crack

But not for what is discovered”
—
“The very ground of the path
And the littered grow ancient

A shovel’s scratched edge
So like any other man’s

We are troubled by incredulity
We are trouble by scratched things

Becoming familiar
Becoming extreme

Let grief
Be
So it be ours

Nor hide one’s eyes
As tides drop along the beaches in the thin wash of breakers

And so desert each other”
—
“Combed thru the piers the wind
Moves in the clever city
Not the doors but the hinges
Finds the secret of motion
As tho the hollow ships moved in their voices, murmurs
Flaws
In the wind
Fear fear
At the lumber mastheads
And fetched a message out of the sea again

Say angel say powers

Obscurely ‘thing
About the self’

Prosody

Sings

In the stones

to entrust
To a poetry of statement

At close quarters

A living mind
‘and that one’s own’

what then what spirit

Of the bent seas

Archangel

of the tide
brimming

in the moon-streak

comes in whose absence
earth crumbles”
—
“Old ships are preserved
For their queer silence of obedient seas
Their cutwaters floating in the still water
With their cozy black iron work
And Swedish seamen dead the cabins
Hold the spaced of their deaths
And the hammered nails of necessity
Carried thru the oceans
Where the moon rises grandly
In the grandeur of cause
We have a taste for bedrock
Beneath this spectacle
To gawk at
Something is wrong with the antiques, a black fluid
Has covered them, a black splintering
Under the eyes of young wives
People talk wildly, we are beginning to talk wildly, the wind
At every summit
Our overcoats trip us
Running for the bus
Our arms stretched out
In a wind from what were sand dunes”
—
“Miracle of the children the brilliant
Children the word
Liquid as woodlands Children?

When she was a child I read Exodus
To my daughter ‘The children of Israel…’

Pillar of fire
Pillar of cloud

We stared at the end
Into each other’s eyes Where
She said hushed

Were the adults Miracle of the children
We dreamed to each other
The brilliant children Miracle

Of their brilliance Miracle
of”